“I’m not saying gnome is bad here”… but it lacks basic DE features, pushed useless crap like the activity view to people and slow animations that can’t be completely turned off. To top things they try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).
All for a “design and usability view” that doesn’t amount to anything productive.
I guess the catch is the fact that they don’t really need it. They have real time location from any Android device anyways (because of that feature that sends the lists of wifi networks around you from time to time), no need to storage the timeline on their servers, it’s only duplicate data. lol
My model is more about the ability to surf the web without SPAM coming at me from all possible sides and avoiding services like Google Drive, iCloud etc not much because of the data privacy aspect but more because I don’t to become hostage of one of those companies because they’ll decide to charge more and/or lock me out of my account without any way to get back to it.
Doing things like self-hosting, using ungoogled chromium, LibreWolf and a bunch of the extensions listed by others fixes the “SPAM and hostage issue” with the added bonus of some privacy.
Well MS being anti competitive as usual. Side note, I like Tuta very much, finally an independent provider, but I would never use it as they don’t provide IMAP/SMTP.
I’ve already considered Debian, but… I dunno, this isn’t what I’d call the most logical reason, but I just kinda don’t like it as my desktop OS. I’d use Debian over basically anything else for a server, but as a desktop OS I don’t like the vibe.
I was on the same boat as you are, flatpak essentially made it all perfect.
Xfce works better everywhere and with everything, however it falls to the same pitfall that KDE has, eventually you’ll require some libadwaita application, flatpak and whatnot and then you’ll end up with a Frankenstein system half Xfce half GNOME components and themes that don’t apply to all apps equally. :(
Yes FLAC and 10,000 isn’t that much. I also have an iPod Classic 6th gen and I love it, but the mechanical hard drive had to go, it eventually slowed down and made noise sometimes. The SD card mod made it way better, lighter, battery lasts longer, transferring songs also seems faster. If it weren’t for the 10k sound limitation I would be more than happy with it, no need for Bluetooth.